Not all black men were reaping the benefits of increasing opportunity that came via civil rights legislation. As we’ve seen, black unemployment rates were growing, and the racial disparities are even greater if we account for the high rates of incarceration among less-educated black men.25 Still, the proportion of blacks who are poor is lower today than in 1960, and blacks’ median household income, after adjusting for inflation, is higher.26 Black marriage rates began to fall even while the black middle class was growing, and they continued falling after 1980 even as black men’s unemployment rates and real wages improved (although not relative to white men’s). We’ll return to this problematic mismatch between historical trends in marriage and labor force patterns toward the end of this article.
